


Incense and Peppermints

by BlindSwandive



Category: Colbert Report RPF, Daily Show RPF, Fake News, Fake News RPF
Genre: Adultery, Afterglow, Established Relationship, M/M, Peppermints, Sanctioned affair, Vignettes, but not so afterglowy sometimes, incense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 17:33:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9618041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: Four vignettes; covering signs of their affair is starting to strain Jon and Stephen's relationship.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written early 2007 when Jon and Stephen were still hosting their respective back-to-back shows. Slowly trying to move all of my fic (...maybe just some of my fic) over to AO3 from a very disused LJ. 
> 
> Disclaimer etc. Not implying that the real people are really doing this, no libel intended, don't sue me I love you etc.
> 
> Feedback is love. <3

Stephen knew it would backfire, eventually, but he laughed, anyway. "Are you kidding? Incense?"  
  
"What?" Jon asked, defensive, but with the kind of sleepy, self-deprecating laugh Stephen could only get out of him after lunch-hour trysts, when he was particularly sweet and vulnerable. The laugh that made it worth it, to Stephen, to razz the man he had just been tangled with, and who was crawling out of his grip (despite his best efforts) to reach for the lighter. Jon pushed away at his clinging, lightly. "Hey, let me, just. . . And anyway, you're a Catholic, I thought you people loved this stuff."  
  
"Uh, yeah, it ranks up there with eucharist crackers and boy sopranos. You know, as churchy aphrodisiacs go."  
  
The laugh, again. Stephen loved it, the sweet, pitiful "wish I'd gotten away with that" sound. It _moved_ him, and left him laughing, too, full of feathers. He managed to hook his arms determinedly around Jon's waist, to pull himself close, again, and bury his face in a soft hip. "Stop moving," he whined, muffled by flesh and hooking his knees and ankles awkwardly around Jon's squirming legs.  
  
"Babe," Jon pleaded, struggling to move within the octopus grip, "I have to move to put the incense in the. . . thing, for incense. . . If I--"  
  
"'Babe'?" Stephen interrupted, wide-eyed and delighted. "Oh my fuck, you called me 'babe'. . . " Stephen was cackling, then, falling back onto the carpet beneath them, pulling a yelping Jon with him.  
  
" _Colbert,_ " Jon scolded, trying to sound stern through more of that harassed laughter, "let me--if I leave it over the carpet we'll burn the place down. And I like this apartment!" He fussed to angle the stick of incense back into the flame of the lighter, to keep upright amidst Stephen's grappling. "Man, If you make me homeless, I'm moving the four of us in with you all, and me and Tracey'll take your big old bed away from you. You'll be sleeping on the floor with Monkey."  
  
"Oh, 'Just the slew of us, we can make it if we try,'" Stephen sang, but his energy was winding down, fast, his laughter failing. If it was time to mention their families, it was time to get up, get dressed, and get out. He squeezed Jon for a last moment of warm denial, but it, too, faded.  
  
"All right, then, burn your little 'incense,'" Stephen relented, after a long moment, loosing him to wave air quotes and suppress a sigh. "What is that about, anyway? Making up for not smoking, anymore? Have to light something else after illicit lunchtime sex?"  
  
"Stephen, maybe you haven't noticed, but sex leaves a little something in the air," Jon offered, a little stiffly, and neither of them laughed, this time. "Women can smell that shit anywhere, they pick up on it. You don't think my Tracey would? It already confuses the dogs, and she's way smarter than they are."  
  
Stephen smiled for him--he had to--but he shook his head, collecting his limbs back into something like the proper arrangement. "So you're burning incense? She won't smell incense and know what's been happening in your office? Right here, on the floor of your little home office?" He rolled away to gather his clothes up.  
  
"Well, it'll. . . you know, mask it. She'll just think I'm smoking grass again. I think." Jon shrugged, focusing hard on the little flame. "And, anyway, I've been using it around her, lately. So that it's not. . . out of the ordinary. So she doesn't think about it."  
  
Stephen smiled off-center, looking down at his socks as he tugged them up. "Does it bother you that you're going to that kind of length?"  
  
Jon didn't say anything, but Stephen glanced up just in time to see him nod, as he blew out the flame from the orange tip. Sandalwood and dark filled the air.  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
"Mints? I thought you were a gum kind of guy?"  
  
Stephen looked up, stunned. He was, frankly, surprised that Jon could sound at all, after that. He discreetly tucked the tiny mint into his cheek with his tongue. "Fuck that, I thought you were about to go into some kind of asthmatic coma. What are you doing forming coherent speech? Or breathing?"  
  
"Not. . . really breathing too well, actually." Jon laughed weakly, but he was still clutching at a stitch in his side. "But you know I can't--" he yawned, desperately, widely--"damn, can't give up an opportunity."  
  
"What, to tell me I'm some kind of. . " Stephen waved a hand, willing the words to rise in the wake, "kind of inconsistent twat who's been lying to you about this essential, mint-scorning part of my being?"  
  
". . . Well, yeah. Basically."  
  
"All right, all right. You got me, I'm not as anti-mint as all that, then." Stephen dabbed at his mouth with the corner of his handkerchief, finally pushing up off of his knees with a grunt. "But sugarless gum is still the superior freshening instrument. _And_ it helps remove plaque." He reached out to fondly twist some of Jon's hair out of place, smiling.  
  
Jon sighed, lazily arranging himself back into his pants. "You bastard. You know, I figured, at least one of those times you turned down my minty goodness, you really did want one. You just been running me around."  
  
Stephen grinned to the left, sheepish. "Well, yeah. Of course." Pointedly, he rolled the mint back onto his tongue, sucking his cheeks in against his teeth in his vigor for it.  
  
"It's worse than that, isn't it?" Jon reluctantly heaved himself up from Stephen's office chair, only narrowly catching his balance with the desk, as it rolled from beneath him faster than he'd anticipated. "It is, you're not just not anti-mint, you're secretly some kind of crazy mint-slut. If you'd gone at me half as good as you're going at that mint--"  
  
"Ex _cuse_ me? Mister-'When you blow me, I can't feel my toes'?" Stephen's eyebrows threatened to lose themselves in his distinctly wild hair.  
  
"--I'm just saying. I'd probably be dead, right now." Jon eased himself close enough to tangle his arms around Stephen's neck, and smack a friendly kiss on his jaw, before dropping his chin onto the sweatered shoulder before him. When he leaned his weight in, Stephen staggered a little, but finally wrapped his arms awkwardly back around Jon, too, nosing deep into his hair, where it was thickest.  
  
Stephen closed his eyes and rolled the mint once more across his tongue.  
  
Jon sighed.  
  
After a long, quiet moment, he disentangled himself with an "All right," swatting Stephen's hip as he backed up, looking down for the location of his abandoned gloves. "Get you and your jizz-free breath home to your wife, pal. My place for lunch, Monday?" He turned off towards the door, swiping his gloves off of the bookcase and pulling them on.  
  
Stephen managed not to wince, but caught himself and nodded, returning a thump to Jon's shoulder. "Yeah. Yeah, sure." He even smiled at Jon's back.  
  
Jon pulled on his coat, on his way out the door. "Later, man."  
  
". . .'night."  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
The email Jon sent ("sick of this drama feeling-unloved shit, bah, see you here saturday - yo") prepared Stephen for a fight, not for what he found when he let himself quietly into Jon's apartment.  
  
Cookies?  
  
"Jon, are you. . . " Stephen sniffed, cautiously laying his coat over the living room couch, "are you baking something? Isn't that dangerous?" He didn't dare step out of the relative safety of the doorway, let alone towards the kitchen or down the dark abyss of the hallway.  
  
Jon emerged from said abyss looking grave (but smelling unmistakably of sweet, burnt things). "It's the nutmeggy gingerbread men of doom, Stephen, they've come to get us."  
  
"I think that's cinnamon, not nutmeg," Stephen observed, but then faltered for a moment, looking over Jon's left shoulder to the hall, and then over his right, towards the kitchen. He knotted his brows and pointed, helpfully; "The kitchen's over there. How are you baking--" he pointed down the hall, then, "--back there?"  
  
"I thought I'd try something new." Jon couldn't keep the grin from his face. "C'mon, what are we doing standing in the living room? We could be making out on the floor. With the gingerbread men."  
  
Stephen gave in, stumped, but soon found the source of the sweet ginger smell--on the desk, in the office, in the form of a small, warm brown cone, burning away on a short dish. ". . . Before, too?" he couldn't help but ask, confused and gesturing.  
  
Jon waved it away. "No, Jesus, it's not that, it's. . . I've been burning it all morning. Let's just. . . have it, okay?" He was encroaching fast on Stephen's personal space, collecting him. "This is a good affair," he insisted, bracingly, though his grin was timid. "They have _allowed_ us to do this, so long as they don't have to hear about it and so long as we keep the kids in the dark. That's not much to ask. Who the hell gets that luxury and then stays guilty anyway?" Jon sighed, and wrapped his arms around Stephen's waist. "We're gonna' burn it anyway, right? And I've had enough of the whiplash from cozy to bitchy, messing up my post-coital high. _Incense_ is cozy, not some... some whacked signal for 'get out of my apartment.' It's--" and here inspiration struck, "--it's practically like a tiny fireplace and bearskin rug in one convenient cone."  
  
"It--really?"  
  
"Yeah, really. Incense can be sexy." Jon was practically begging to get away with this, though his hands were starting to do more of the pleading.  
  
Stephen's look was skeptical. "Even when it smells like cookies?"  
  
"Stephen--"  
  
"--Okay, but I just feel like there should be a blacklight poster, or something. . ."  
  
Stephen earned his favorite laugh, as Jon shoved him, lightly. "Man, just take off your damn pants."  
  
Later, Jon mumbled into Stephen's ear (from on top of him), "See? Sexy," and Stephen grinned into the carpet.  
  
The cone snuffed itself into nothing, and neither of them moved to leave.  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
Jon came to anticipate the first Friday-night kiss in Stephen's office with a strange new glee, a little of which focused around the certainty that Stephen was developing cavities on his behalf.  
  
Would it be Red Hots, tonight? Black licorice? Swedish Fish? Those minty M &Ms you can only get around Christmas, but which Stephen managed to have a stash of at least into March?  
  
"A man shouldn't flinch at a candy wrapper, either," Stephen had garbled, before pushing a butterscotch disk into Jon's mouth with his tongue, and they were square. If he was going to taste like candy by the time he got home, anyway, why shouldn't Jon get the benefit of that, as well?  
  
And their strange tension eased in the face of Now, of Open, of Ours. It became part of the affair, rather than it's each-day-dying, the smoke that mingled with their breath, and the sweet and spice on their tongues. It became _theirs._  
  
But Stephen was right, after all. It would, indeed, backfire. And during Mass, no less.  
  
It was business as usual, with Stephen tucked onto the end of the wooden bench, at the aisle, the children sandwiched between him and Evie. He had just closed his watering eyes against the smoke of the incense burner wafting by when it caught him, just like that, coiled around him like a snake with its prey; a vividly imagined taste, a sensation across his palm, all carried on a rippling wave of familiar dark and musk. All at once, his mouth was closed on the nape of Jon's neck, the short grey hair tickling his lips as his tongue and teeth loved on the skin there. His bare chest was stuck to Jon's back with heat and sweat, his arms loose and heavy around Jon's ribs, his palm skating down, down over the fur dividing a soft belly, seeking, needing. . .  
  
And just as abruptly, it was gone, and Stephen was left shifting, uncomfortable and stunned, on the pew, cold and hot at once, from the sweat prickling his neck and for the wanting of the body that wasn't in his arms, after all.  
  
This was _not_ the time.  
  
But he smiled a secret little smile to himself, biting down on his tongue, and made a mental note to send Jon a very nice box of peppermints.

**Author's Note:**

> My notes when I wrote this say it was inspired by my beau burning incense. It was going to be a fluff piece about Pavlovian reactions; incense during sex = squirming during mass. But it didn't quite turn out that way!


End file.
